Future of Portable Gaming

In this year's E3 (Electronic Entertainment Exposition), Nintendo, which has been dominating the portable gaming industry since the late 90s, unveiled its new portable gaming system called "Nintendo DS". The "DS" stands for "Dual Screens". As you can see from the picture, the dual screen format allows developers to design games like no other on the market today. In addition, Nintendo says that this new gameheld will have the capabilities of touch- screen input, voice recognition, and wireless communication.
See more Nintendo DS Photos from E3
Official Nintendo DS Release Info

After taking over and dominating the gaming industry from Nintendo, Sony's Playstation division unveils its first portable gaming system, Playstation Portable or better known as PSP, due to release sometime next year for the U.S. The PSP comes with built-in Wi-Fi and a USB 2.0 port. The PSP is a portable gaming system with big multimedia capabilities supporting various media formats. The screen of the unit is a 16:9 widescreen TFT LCD display boasting over 16.7 million colors at a resolution of 480x272. Additionally, Sony claims that when the system releases, PSP will be able to render games close to that of the current PS2 system.
See more photos of the PSP from IGN
Read more about PSP on IGN

It appears that Nintendo's DS focuses on the gaming while Sony's PSP is more of a multimedia powerhouse that could potentially compete with perhaps iPods and other portable video players. The DS is certainly interesting with its dual screen format. I hope that game developers will take advantage of this new concept and capability in portable gaming. However, Nintendo needs to "grow up" and release more games that target the older crowd. Nintendo plans to release the DS in late 2004 which gives it an advantage over Sony whose PSP won't be available for the U.S. until 2005. However, with Sony's success in Playstation and all sorts of portable electronics, I have confidence that it will make a big dent or perhaps take over the portable gaming industry. Now, the question is "When is Microsoft going to reveal its portable gaming device?"